White House releases Benghazi emails

The White House on Wednesday released 99 pages of emails on last year's deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, in hopes of putting an end to an issue that Republicans in Congress have used for months to attack the Obama administration.

The Sept. 11attack killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Since then, critics have seized on the administration's initial public response to the terror attack, which at first was blamed on a protest over an anti-Islam video produced in the U.S.

One of the newly released, partially blacked-out emails shows that then-CIA Director David Petraeus objected to the final talking points that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice used five days after the deadly assault, because he wanted to see more detail publicly released, including a warning the CIA issued about plans for a break-in at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.

The White House also released a single page of handwritten notes made by Petraeus' deputy, Mike Morell, after a meeting at the White House the day before Rice's appearance on television news shows to discuss the attack.

On that page, Morell scratched out from the CIA's early drafts of talking points any mention of al-Qaida, the experience of fighters in Libya, Islamic extremists and a warning to the Cairo embassy on the eve of the attacks of calls for a demonstration and break-in by jihadists.

"No mention of the cable to Cairo, either?" Petraeus wrote after receiving Morell's edited version, developed after an intense back-and-forth among Obama administration officials. "Frankly, I'd just as soon not use this, then."

A senior U.S. intelligence official said Morell made the changes to the talking points because of his concerns that they could prejudge an FBI investigation into who was responsible for the Benghazi attack.

The official said Morell also didn't think it was fair to disclose the CIA's advance warning without giving the State Department a chance to explain how it responded. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

Critics have highlighted an email by then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland that expressed concern that any mention of prior warnings or the involvement of al-Qaida would give congressional Republicans ammunition to attack the administration in the weeks before the presidential election in November.

That email, among those released by the White House, was sent by Nuland on Sept. 14 at 7:39 p.m. to officials in the White House, State Department and CIA. "I have serious concerns about all the parts highlighted below, and arming members of Congress to start making assertions to the media that we ourselves are not making because we don't want to prejudice the investigation," she wrote.

The emails were shared with Congress earlier this year as a condition for allowing the nomination of John Brennan for CIA director to move forward.

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

Email this article

White House releases Benghazi emails

The White House on Wednesday released 99 pages of emails on last year's deadly attack on the U.S.